"'America is something that can be easily moved. Moved to the right direction.They won’t get in our way'"
Benjamin Netanyahu

Thursday, August 8, 2013

"Getting away with corpses in the streets, on Eid?"

"... Of course, this may be a little naive. Armed, as he thinks he is, with the ‘people’s’ mandate, perhaps General al-Sisi thinks he can get away with corpses in the streets this week. But he has shown himself a patient man, and his ‘interim’ government’s assurance that it would still welcome international help to resolve the conflict suggests that he has not yet reached the point of no return. US deputy secretary of state William Burns – a diplomat who brings failure along in his brief case –may have departed, but the military are still trying to absorb John McCain’s description of their July 3 antics as a “coup”. Rarely has the Muslim Brotherhood had such American diplomatic support – and the Qataris are very frustrated that they were not allowed to meet Mohamed Morsi... The Brotherhood knows al-Sisi does not want a mass slaughter. Al-Sisi knows the Americans do not want a mass slaughter. Perhaps some sort of ‘people power’ can be organised – now there’s a thought – to drive the Brotherhood away and leave the army unspattered with Brotherhood blood. After all, a lot of the snipers who have shot down Morsi’s supporters these last five weeks have been unidentified. But there are too many foreign diplomats, NGOs and journalists sniffing around for that to work on a large scale.So which is more important? The will of ‘the people’ – those who hate Morsi – or the steadfastness of the Brotherhood for whom martyrdom (often in Egyptian prisons) has long been a characteristic? What about the dignity of the Egyptian army? About to set sail aboard his royal ship of exile, the ‘al-Mahrussa’ in 1952, King Farouk turned to the officers who had dethroned him. “Look after the army,” he told General Mohamed Naguib, soon to be deposed by Colonel Gamal-Abdul Nasser. Everyone loves the army.And the Egyptian army rather loves itself. Its vast and obscenely bloated investments in real estate, banking and industry make this one of the richest Arab armies in one of the poorest Arab countries. It’s hardly in their interest to start a mini-war in the streets of Cairo. But the Brotherhood itself is bloated with arrogance, its record in power – with Morsi as their cypher – hardly worthy of the support of the ‘people’.